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Wednesday, 28 February 2018

French Artillery

Work on the French 1812 collection continues with the first of the artillery. For this I decided to continue with the plastic theme and chose to use the Victrix figures.

The set comes with three guns, that can be made as either 8-pound or 12-pound models, and fifteen

gunners, with a range of headgear and arm options to make first or second grade gunners.

I chose to make up one each of the two gun types, using four crew per gun. The remaining seven crew will be used to crew the light 4-pound guns that are attached to the infantry brigades. The third gun from the set will be assembled in transit mode and used with one of the French in Egypt limbers.

First is the 8-pound set, if firing poses. The wide variety of poses allows for a great deal of variety.

I have to admit that I really don’t have the patience to stick all the bits together on multi part kits... (this may seem a bit strange,given that my job is designing multi part plastic kits!) but there is no denying the flexibility you get...

I think I have struck the answer to working with the plastics. I know that I can paint six foot or three mounted figures in an evening. So the last thing I do in the evening, after I have painted my daily allocation, is to glue together the next night's figures. In that way I'm only assembling three or six figures and much of the tedium of assembly is eliminated.

A couple of fine additions there, and some great poses. I have to admit the assembly of plastics puts me off them as well but, thinking about it, it's probably no worse than some the tidying up that often has to be done on metal figures.

This is very true because generally there is no flash in the plastics, although there is usually some degree of cleaning up where the figure is cut away from the sprue, but it is minimal. And the other advantage is where there are separate arms to glue on they stay glued on!

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About Me

I have been involved in historical wargaming since 1972, co-founding the Auckland Wargaming Club in 1974 and was for 15 years involved in the "industry" in a business that eventually became Battlefront Miniatures.
My main focus is on the mid-19th Century and I now collect in only two scales: 28mm for all land based gaming and 1:600 for mid-19th century naval gaming.
My philosophy for gaming is:
- Play games with people whose company I enjoy
- The game must be true to the period
- The games must be visually attractive – both the armies and terrain
- The end result doesn’t matter - games must be fun.